Gael Monfils and Losing In Style

First-time visitors to the U.S. Open learned one of the tournament’s annual lessons yesterday: never get Ashe Stadium tickets during the first week. The ranked players in Ashe—Schiavone, Federer, S. Williams, Wozniacki, Djokovic—combined to lose just fourteen games. Average match length: one hour and six minutes. It took Carlos Berlocq exactly that long to win his first game against Novak Djokovic, having lost the first fourteen. The crowd offered a standing ovation. He would win only one more game.

The top players were all models of poise and consistency, except one: Gael Monfils, ranked 7th in the world, and arguably the most physically gifted player on tour. He is the closest thing tennis has to the NBA’s Slam Dunk contest, and he plays not once, but all year round. In his match yesterday, against Juan Carlos Ferrero, he hit three of the tournament’s five best shots thus far (James Blake has the top spot.) There was a diving baseline stab, a punched volley while seated on the ground, and then this, which I have no idea how to describe:

This was the day’s best match—at four hours and forty-eight minutes, it outlasted the entire day session in Ashe. All told, Monfils hit eighty-one winners, forty-seven more than Ferrero and thirty-six more than the day’s five losers in Ashe, combined. The only problem: Monfils also had eighty-one unforced errors. And he lost.

The match encapsulated what enthralls and frustrates so many about Monfils, who has made just one Grand Slam semifinal in his career. A colleague, watching him play for the first time, remarked that he had instantly become her favorite player. The same thing happened last year, when I brought a trio of tennis newbies to the Open, all of whom pronounced him their top choice. The appeal is easy to figure. Monfils does not so much run around the court as he leaps, dives, slides, and, occasionally, crashes. He is quick, tall, and athletic with a big forehand and elastic body, all of which puts him in position to make improbable shots on a regular basis.

It often seems, in fact, that Monfils would rather hit half a dozen crowd-pleasing shots in a losing effort than play a solid, measured game and roll to a quiet victory. Winning does not seem to concern him. “It’s not bad, you know,” Monfils said, when asked if he was disappointed by what had been a very bad loss. “Today is a good day for me. It’s my birthday. My mom was there.” This lack of ambition baffles his supporters, who don’t understand how he could be so content to ignore his potential. And yet, some fans, like one on Twitter, point out that perhaps this is his charm: “Let it be known that Monfils may be frustrating but the thing that I hate is also what makes me love him. Such is life.”

Love, hate, style, substance—life’s great dichotomies. Perhaps the problem is that winning would ruin Monfils. He is a troubled genius—the closest that a lavishly compensated athlete can come to being an eccentric artist. He wants the crowd to recognize that he is doing something unique and different and, in the end, perhaps more important than winning: he is entertaining. After losing a doubles match last night, ending his tournament, Monfils playfully threw two rackets, a shirt, an on-court umbrella and a box of tissues into the crowd. He’s a natural showman, and nearly every tennis fan would rather watch him than, say, Robin Soderling, the world’s 6th ranked player and a two-time Grand Slam finalist, who spends his matches tirelessly sending groundstrokes from the baseline. One offers success, the other offers a good time. It’s not obvious which is better.